Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic: Hall of Mirrors
Nadia Bou Ali
Abstract
Why did modern Arabic grammarians fall in love with language again? Rather than raise the philological question of origins, the love of language poses a philosophical question: why is there language rather than nothing? Language does not provide a resolute sense of home; rather it is a love-object that allows the rejection of tradition. This love arises at the moment when the Arab world is integrated into the capitalist world market and traditional symbolic functions collapse, calling into question the relation between words and things. The problems of language speak for a subject of the uncon ... More
Keywords: Nahda, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Lacan, Psychoanalysis, Butrus al Bustani, Critical Theory, Literary Theory, language, liberalism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 | Print ISBN-13: 9781474409841 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2021 | DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409841.001.0001 |
